Shanna Trumbly was sitting in a cave roasting hotdogs when she saw the hummingbird. The Eugene artist was visiting Yachats with her family and, while on a hike, they had taken shelter from the rain.

“Out of the corner of my eye, I see this little bzzz,” she says, fluttering her hands. “There are no flowers around or anything. It was just like rock walls and the ocean … It was so bizarre because it wasn’t even a place where a hummingbird would be hanging out.”

Sculptor Ian Beyer tells me with a wry smile that his sister, painter Erika Beyer, is the smart one, what with her dual college degrees in scientific illustration and architecture. This is the sort of affectionate ribbing that commonly passes between siblings; what’s not so common is the level of talent that unifies the Beyers in their separate creative endeavors.

Esteban Camacho weaves through the skateboard jungle that is the new WJ Skatepark + Urban Plaza, finding some smooth invisible path while I stumble after him, jumping out of the way of teens on wheels. It’s clear the artist is a seasoned veteran of the site. We sit on a bench carved into a ramp, skateboarders whirring around us. Hands leathery with green paint, Camacho points up at the murals developing on two pillars buttressing I-105.

“Looking at the world today, there is tremendous uncertainty in our lives,” says Venerable Jigme Rinpoche, founder and director at the Palmo Center for Peace and Education. “We’re confronted with difficulty, crisis and challenges. We urgently need the vision and courage to find ways to handle these difficulties, both individually and globally, with deeper acceptance, insight and compassion.”

By some fateful collision of time, situation and personality, certain individuals come to represent the places where they live, in such a way that the association becomes nearly mythological: Lou Reed symbolizes the junky glam of the East Village, Harvey Milk is forever Mayor of the Castro District, Saul Bellow haunts Chicago’s Humboldt Park.

“I was born in 1984,” says Nicole Anne Colbath. “For me that Clash show wasn’t gonna happen.” Colbath is referring to the legendary British punk band’s early ’80s concert at the UO’s McArthur Court. A flyer for that show is now safely housed by the Eugene Underground Music Archive, a nonprofit organization “dedicated to the collection of flyers and ephemera,” filed with 3,000 other Eugene-area concert flyers mostly from the late ’70s through the ’90s.

Irene Hardwicke Olivieri and Jo Hamilton may not be native Oregonians, but their art seems to spring from the earthy soul of this region. Both artists’ work has strong ties to craft movements, activism and community (whether that consists of people or animals). Now living in Oregon, Olivieri and Hamilton also both work in a large-scale format and display an immaculate attention to detail. However, their work is wildly different — Olivieri creates nature-infused oil paintings and Hamilton constructs urban “crochet paintings” of people and cityscapes.

“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” a bright yellow billboard yelled out at New York City in 2012. Beneath the question was this statistic: Less than 4 percent of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 76 percent of the nudes are female. Created by art activists the Guerrilla Girls, the message was directed at the Metropolitan Museum.